Deputy threatened to kill female inmate after rape at Georgia jail, lawsuit says

A former inmate says a deputy raped her in an area of a Georgia jail without surveillance cameras and then threatened to kill her if she told anyone about it, according to a federal lawsuit.

Rape and sexual battery of female inmates at the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center “was rampant, routine, and widespread,” according to the woman’s lawsuit filed July 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

Particularly, sexual abuse would take place within the jail’s Workforce program, in which “young, attractive inmates” were selected for participation, court documents state.

The woman, who was detained in the jail in Canton during 2019 and 2020, filed the lawsuit against Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds and several other officers who worked at the detention center while employed by the sheriff’s office, which runs the detention center, according to a complaint.

She accuses sheriff’s office personnel of “routinely” engaging in “coerced and non-consensual sexual acts” with inmates a part of the Workforce program.

Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, told McClatchy News in a statement that the office has not been served with the lawsuit and is unable to comment on pending litigation.

The woman’s attorney, Eric Fredrickson, told McClatchy News in a statement that what happened to his client was “tragic and inexcusable.”

“There appears to be a systemic culture of sexual abuse at the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center,” Fredrickson added.

The woman’s time in the Workforce program

In Sept. 2020, a sheriff’s office sergeant asked two female inmates to join the Workforce program but “knowing the dangers, they refused,” the complaint states. The sergeant then asked the woman who would later file the lawsuit to join and she accepted.

As the woman performed her Workforce duties, including laundry and delivering food to inmate cells, she began hearing about “rampant sexual abuse of inmates in the program,” Soon after joining, a deputy allegedly began inappropriately touching her, according to the complaint.

However, she did not report the deputy out of fear “for her well-being and that she would be removed from Workforce” which offered inmates extra benefits such as more time outside of one’s own jail cell, better food and even time credited off their sentences, the complaint states.

In Oct. 2020, this deputy told the woman to join him in retrieving canned food items from the detention center’s stockroom — which was under construction and did not have working surveillance cameras at the time, according to the lawsuit.

There, the deputy is accused of “violently” raping the woman and threatening to kill her “if she ever told anybody,” the complaint states.